If your child struggles with reading, there are many strategies to try to help them. The first thing for a young reader to do is to PREPARE their brain for reading. Think of this like reading a map before taking a road trip. Your child needs to know where they are going and how to get there. If possible, have your child choose a book that they are interested in and appeals to them. If they find books with long blocks of text inmidang, try shorter books or graphic novels. Don’t feel like there are certain books or types of books kids “should” be reading. All reading is beneficial, especially if they enjoy it. Have your child take a moment to look at the book. Look at the cover. Flip through the pages. Read through the table of contents. Doing this will give your child (and you!) a brief idea of what kind of book it is (e.g. mystery, fantasy, adventure) and what the tone of the book will be. For ex- ample, the covers of the popular series, I Survived, are very different from Diary of a Wimpy Kid. A glance at the cover will tell you what you need to know about those books. If your child is assigned a book for school, have them determine what kind of informaon they need. Is the assignment a book report? Do they need to write a summary? Is the reading assign- ment to find informaon on a topic? If so, then have your child idenfy what kind of informaon they need, and they will be beer prepared to find it during reading. The more kids prepare ahead of me and know what they need from reading, the more it will help with comprehension. Have your child ask these quesons: What do I already know about this topic? If it is an author I am familiar with, what does that author write like? What can I expect? What is the purpose of reading this book/passage/arcle? All of these quesons can help prepare their minds for read- ing. These steps do not have to take a long me. As your kids are looking at the cover or flipping through the pages, they can quickly go over in their minds what they expect from the book. In me, it will become so natural they won’t even noce they are doing it. Reading Strategy: PREPARE